Update to Rakudo Star Release 2015.03

2015-03-21

A useful, usable, "early adopter" distribution of Perl 6

On behalf of the Rakudo and Perl 6 development teams, I'm happy to
announce the March 2015 release of "Rakudo Star", a useful and usable
distribution of Perl 6. The tarball for the March 2015 release is
available from http://rakudo.org/downloads/star/.

This Rakudo Star release comes with support for the MoarVM
backend (all module tests pass on supported platforms) along with
experimental support for the JVM backend (the modules Bailador,
Digest::MD5 and Grammar::Profiler::Simple are known to fail tests).

In the Perl 6 world, we make a distinction between the language
("Perl 6") and specific implementations of the language such as
"Rakudo Perl". This Star release includes release 2015.03 of the
Rakudo Perl 6 compiler, version 2015.03 of MoarVM, plus various
modules, documentation, and other resources collected from the
Perl 6 community.

There are some key features of Perl 6 that Rakudo Star does not yet
handle appropriately, although they will appear in upcoming releases.
Some of the not-quite-there features include:

advanced macros

threads and concurrency (in progress)

Unicode strings at levels other than codepoints

interactive readline that understands Unicode

non-blocking I/O (in progress)

much of Synopsis 9 and 11

There is an online resource at http://perl6.org/compilers/features
that lists the known implemented and missing features of Rakudo's
backends and other Perl 6 implementations.

In many places we've tried to make Rakudo smart enough to inform the
programmer that a given feature isn't implemented, but there are many
that we've missed. Bug reports about missing and broken features are
welcomed at rakudobug@perl.org.

See http://perl6.org/ for links to much more information about
Perl 6, including documentation, example code, tutorials, reference
materials, specification documents, and other supporting resources. A
draft of a Perl 6 book is available as docs/UsingPerl6-draft.pdf in
the release tarball.